John Kenneth Muir's Blog, page 897
May 24, 2012
Sci-Fi Wisdom of the Week: Wing Commander
"You spend so much time out here alone, you end up losing your humanity. When Pilgrims began to lose touch with their heritage, they saw themselves as superior to man. And in their arrogance, they chose to abandon all things human and follow what they called their destiny. Some say they believed they were gods..."
-- Wing Commander (1999)
Underrated but Great #1: The Twilight Zone, Season 5 (1963 – 1964)
This
week I’m inaugurating a new blog post category here, one that I plan to return
to on a semi-regular basis. I’m calling
it: “Underrated but Great.” The category
is designed to examine the conventional wisdom that surrounds cult-television,
horror films, or popular movies in general.
Basically,
my premise is this: critical reputations form around movies, TV episodes, TV seasons,
and entire series over time….like shrouds.
Those reputations – even if not
entirely true – are difficult to shake.
Sometimes, the conventional wisdom about certain works of art lingers
for decades, even in the face of new evidence that that it might be wrong, or
at least not representative of the whole story.
I
want to start this category with a TV series that already boasts a reputation
as a classic. Across the decades, Rod
Serling’s The Twilight Zone has rightfully earned a vast number of
plaudits. The anthology is beloved by
generations, and seemingly exists as a permanent part of the American pop
culture firmament. The series been re-made on television twice
(once in 1985 and once in 2002), and a feature film premiered in 1983, with
another one slated for release in the years ahead.
And
yet to listen to the accepted narrative about it, The Twilight Zone’s
quality degenerated as it reached its final year. The fourth season experiment of making the
series episodes an hour in length was hard to recover from, the legend goes. Creator Rod Serling was burned-out after
writing something like eighty episodes and long-standing writers apparently had
copious complaints with the new producer, William Froug.
While
all of this background material may indeed be one-hundred percent true, an
unbiased look at the final batch of Twilight Zone episodes reveals that
the series was actually still in its creative prime.
The proof of the pudding is in the eating, so take a moment and just gaze across the episode
catalog and you’ll see that the final tally of episodes feature some of the
most well-remembered and often-talked about installments, including “Nightmare
at 20,000 Feet,” about the gremlin on the wing of the plane, and “Living Doll,”
the episode that introduced the fearsome toy, Talky Tina.
Other
episodes, like “The Bewitching Pool” and “Come Wander with Me” have also grown
in critical esteem since they were produced, and become part of the Twilight
Zone mystique, a discussion which always begins with the words “Do you remember the one where…”
Incidentally,
Season Five also aired the award-winning short-film “An Occurrence at Owl Creek
Bridge,” simultaneously a budget-saving expedient and a great Twilight
Zone installment. And one fifth season episode "Steel," by Richard Matheson was remade recently as the film Real Steel.
Here are
five highlights from the underrated Twilight Zone, Season Five
5. “Number Twelve
Looks Just Like You.” In this episode penned by Charles Beaumont,
set in the year 2000, all eighteen year-olds in America must undergo a “transformation,”
a physical re-shaping into a perfect specimen.
The problem is that there are only a handful of available models, so
by-and-large, everyone in this future society looks like everyone else.
One girl, Marilyn (Collin Wilcox) doesn’t
wish to conform to society’s standard of beauty, especially because all those
who do, including her mother (Suzy Parker) seem vapid and obsessed with
appearances. Society eventually forces
Marilyn to comply, and after her plastic surgery she immediately proves just as shallow
and superficial as everyone else.
Produced
in 1964, this episode gazes at both excessive political correctness (it’s
unfair for some people to be beautiful when others are not!), and America’s
always-growing obsession with youth and unnecessary plastic surgery. In the age of Paris Hilton and the
Kardashians -- when appearance not substance matters -- “Number Twelve Looks Just
Like You” is more timely than over.
4. “Living Doll.” I don’t really have to write anything about the values of this episode here except: “I’m Talky Tina, and I’m going to kill you.” This episode is so intriguing because the terrifying living doll is actually, in a weird way, a force of good.
Here, the doll grapples with a nasty
stepfather (Telly Savalas) who emotionally brutalizes his new family. Tina is murderous all right, but the stepfather
certainly has it coming, and a little girl needs to be protected.
Justice is a concept the series often dealt with here, and here a talking doll is the one to mete it.
3. “The Masks” Directed by Ida Lupino, this
Zone tells the story of an old man on the verge of death, Jason Foster (Robert
Keith). During Mardi Gras he holds a
family gathering for the ungrateful relatives who seek to control and inherit
his fortune. He requires each of his ungrateful relatives to adorn a hideous
mask until midnight.
The masks are
grotesque, and carved by an old Cajun. Each of the masks expresses a quality of
its wearer, showing, respectively, vanity, avarice, sadism and the like. When midnight strikes and the masks are taken
off, the wearers are permanently changed, their real faces now reflecting those inner qualities...for
the whole world to recognize on sight.
This
ghoulish episode, which also reveals to audiences the face of death, corrects a flaw in
everyday human existence: You can’t always tell
what’s in a person’s heart by looking at them, can you? With these masks, you can see – straight up –
the ugliness that might be found inside.
It’s a macabre segment, and though the victims wholly deserve their fate,
one also feels a sympathetic sense of horror at the thought of having to go through life with a
face twisted by those masks.
2. “Come Wander with Me.” I’ve made no secret of my absolute love for
this episode of The Twilight Zone. It’s one of my all-time favorites. Here, the
Rock-a-Billy Kid, Floyd Burney (Gary Crosby) goes to backwoods Appalachia in
hopes of exploiting the local music scene (and musicians), but instead comes
across his own unpleasant fate, and a song that expresses his story.
That particular song, “Come Wander with Me,” is one of
the most haunting things you’ll ever hear, and as it is replayed in the
episode, again and again, it grows increasingly menacing, changed with new and upsetting lyrics. The song was resurrected by
director Vincent Gallo for his 2003 film, Brown Bunny .
1. “Nightmare at
20,000 Feet.” Written by Richard Matheson and directed by Richard Donner,
this episode aired originally on October 11, 1963, and is one of the show's
most legendary efforts. In fact it's one of those stories that has become part of the
American pop culture lexicon, and seems to have effortlessly survived the test
and passage of time (and was remade, in 1983's Twilight Zone: the
Movie ).
You all know the plot of this episode by heart: a man named Robert Wilson
(age 37), played by William Shatner has recently recovered from a nervous
breakdown caused by "over-stress" and "under confidence." The
incident that spurred his six months in a sanitarium occurred on a plane in
flight. Now Bob and his wife, Ruth
(Christine White) fly home, and Robert spies a gremlin walking on the plane
during flight..
I'll be blunt: if
there is a more pitch-perfect half-hour of horror television in the medium's
history, I haven't seen it. "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” loses none of its
power (or terror...) on repeat viewing. The story draws you in, and the
universal fear of flying renders the story riveting. William Shatner’s twitchy performance is great, too. He
plays a man trying to hold on to his sanity, but a man who is likable and good.
We relate to his predicament and his fear on a very deep, very basic level. How good is “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet?” So good that you don’t care that the monster
looks like a cuddly, over-fed teddy bear.
Runner-ups on this list of great Season 5 episodes would include "Uncle Simon," about an old man's ultimate revenge upon his greedy niece, "Spur of the Moment" about a woman trying to correct her past and destroying her future, and "The Long Morrow" a tragic story about star-crossed, time-crossed lovers.
Next
time on Underrated but Great: The X-Files, Season 8.
And now I’ll
leave you -- just for chills -- with “Come Wander with Me:”
May 23, 2012
Memory Bank: Great Adventure (Jackson, New Jersey)
As
a child growing up in suburban New Jersey of the mid-1970s, there was probably nothing
more exciting than a (long…) family day at the amusement park called Great
Adventure. The park yet endures -- in Jackson, New Jersey -- and for many years it has existed under the corporate umbrella of Six Flags.
But the
Great Adventure I remember so well – from
my first visit, as a kid of seven or so -- came before that particular era
began.
The
original Great Adventure park was imagined, designed and built by businessman and show-man
extraordinaire, Warner Le Roy (1935 – 2001), whom The New York Times once
termed the city’s “mad genius.”
Mr. Le
Roy was a successful restaurant-owner and son of an early generation of
Hollywood moguls. With Great Adventure
-- which opened its doors on July 1, 1974 -- this entrepreneur imagined a colossal,
one-stop entertainment facility for all tastes.
His park – carved out of beautiful
forest land, but not obtrusively so – would feature a safari, stage shows
of all types, roller-coasters, and even a campground. The park was nicknamed "the Enchanted Forest."
The
first time I visited Great Adventure with my Mom and Dad and sister, it must have
been circa 1976 or 1977. I’m not
certain of the exact date. But I was a little kid, it was
summer, and I remember we got up when it
was still dark, probably before 5:00 am, packed a picnic lunch, and then drove
for what seemed like an eternity to reach the park. At this point in my life, I hadn’t yet visited
Disney World (that happened in 1979...during a hurricane), so I had never seen
anything like the Great Adventure amusement park.
We
drove our car through the safari first, and it was a crazy experience. Animals would walk up freely to the cars and
get very…friendly. I remember monkeys jumped on the roof of our
car and stayed there for a while, and an ostrich stuck its beak in my mother’s
window, scaring the living daylights out of her. It was great fun. But this safari was just prologue. The amusement park was the main event.
As
I recall, you entered Great Adventure through a big gate, and walked an
old-fashioned main street shopping venue where you could buy overpriced
souvenirs. And – on all sides – were attractions
of unbelievable size, color and scale.
There
was the great Ferris Wheel for instance, and from atop it, you could spy the
vast expanse of the park.
There
was the famous Carousel, built in 1881 but then (and now) occupying land at
GA.
Therewas the Runaway Mine Train, a great roller coaster (above a small pond if memory serves…) in the Old West portion of the park.
And
then there was my personal favorite: the
Enterprise. The Enterprise was not a
traditional roller coaster, but a great wheel of cars that circled vertically,
over and over again, at what seemed like high warp speeds. I think this was also my father’s favorite
ride.
Another unforgettable attraction at Great Adventure was the Moon Flume, or Hydro Flume, a log
flume with space age trappings, and which always had long, long lines. Even at that age, I preferred the future to the past, and always
preferred the Moon Flume, with its futuristic look, to the Old West’s log
flume, at the other end of the park.
Over
the years, my family returned to Great Adventure probably five or six times, as
new attractions were developed and added.
Soon
came Lightning Loops, a ride where you traveled a loop heading forward, and
then reversed course and went through it backwards…very fast.
Not
long after, the park also introduced Rolling Thunder, which at that time was
the largest, most frightening roller-coaster I had ever seen. It was an absolute Goliath.
As
the eighties came and went, Great Adventure added attractions like “Free Fall,”
which I thought would stop my heart the one time I rode it, but the park also
faced some bad publicity involving a fire in a haunted house attraction, and a
tragic death on Lightning Loops.
My
last visit to the park was early in the summer of 1990, when I went to the park with
my then-girlfriend, now-wife, Kathryn. She
got sick on one of the rides, and didn’t have a great day. The magic was gone, in part because I had now
grown up, and it was time to move on. We would soon be moving to North Carolina and beginning a life together.
Still,
I’ll always cherish the memories of that first, spectacular, magical summer day in the age of Jimmy Carter, disco and the
bicentennial. I can still feel the excitement
and anticipation during the car ride to the park and during a marathon day spent
on the rides. We rode one ride after the other
after the other, stopping only to see shows and eat our packed lunch of
submarine sandwiches, Coke, and potato chips.
The day lasted till well-after dark, till the thick of the night.
I
recollect, too, riding Great Adventure’s Sky Ride, and looking out across the lighted
entertainment metropolis: a vast land of attractions interspersed with lakes and beautiful
trees. I remember feeling dog tired,
and still not wanting the day to end, hoping against hope that the “great
adventure” would never end. When I finally returned to the car, I fell instantly into a deep slumber...and the whole day felt like a dream
Could
such a magical place really have existed?
To a child, the 1970s Great Adventure was indeed a
dream come true. I suspect that if I
went back to the same park today, I wouldn’t recognize many of the rides or shows or
attractions. Besides, if I really had the urge to visit a modern amusement park, there’s one nearby me called Carowinds. I could just go to that one. But in neither case, would it be the same. I'm reminded of Rod Serling dialogue from The Twilight Zone episode "Walking Distance" -- "Maybe there's only one summer to every customer." If that's the case, I'm fortunate that mine, at GA, was so very, very happy.
In
a few years if not sooner, my five year-old son Joel will be ready for his
first amusement park. It'll be his summer, and I can't wait for it to start. I trust I won't be too old to ride the roller coasters and feel, at least a little,
like a kid at Great Adventure again. All aboard the Log Flume!
You can read more about Great Adventure and its long history here.
Collectible of the Week: Super Laser Assembling 2-in-1 Change Bot
My five year old son absolutely loves transforming robots. Joel passionately collects Beast Wars, Gobots, Transformers, Megazords, Brave of the Sun Fighbird...you name it. Throughout our many travels in search of robots of all sizes and shapes, we often come across toys that we don't entirely recognize. This week's collectible is one of them.
I must confess, I don't know if this particular toy came from a popular Anime franchise or not. I'm not highly conversant in Anime, at least not yet. I'm learning. However, I believe this cool transforming robot set may have originated from something called "Video Senshi Laserion" in the 1980s, or "Super Laser" here in the States.
Regardless, this "Assembling 2-in-1 Change Bot" with "double joint power up" transformation is a pretty awesome mechanical life form. The toy was made in Taiwan, and three separate robots are included.
Individually, the robot consists of "Ex-Caesar" (a car), "Atlas Carbot," and "Atlas-Jetbot." Together, however, the machines make "Super Atlas-Bot," and the back of the box provides detailed, step-by-step instructions for transforming the robots into cars and planes, and vice-versa. Not that Joel needs them. He's far more coordinated at five than I was at that age, and he loves the thrill of discovering how to transform and combine robots. Just between you and me, he's either going to be an engineer, or the world's biggest fanboy. Or both.
As much as Joel wants to get his hands on toys like the Super Laser Assembling 2-in-1 Change Bot and start playing, I'm a devoted fan of box art. Joel and I have an understanding: he gets the toys, and I get the boxes. It's a good compromise, and when he's done playing for the day, the toys go back in the box. Sure, they aren't mint in box anymore -- a phrase Joel has learned -- but I realized a few years back that it's more fun to play with these toys with my son than to keep them in boxes, on display.
I just gave Joel this toy on the weekend, and he loves it...
May 22, 2012
Bring Him Back
I have been watching with great interest over the last week or so the ascendant campaign to resurrect Frank Black, the lead character of Chris Carter’s
Millennium (1996 – 1999). The Back to Frank Black Campaign with Fourth Horseman Press will soon be launching a book dedicated to the beloved character,
as reported by TV Wise. And series star Lance Henriksen himself spoke recently at a
convention about his belief that the character will indeed return.
Twentieth
Century Fox should be listening to the emerging groundswell, because this is
the perfect time to produce a Millennium movie or TV-movie. Forget the tiresome and inaccurate argument
that since the millennium actually turned in 1999 – 2000 the series is somehow out-of-date
or past-its-prime. The contrary is actually
true.
Stylistically
and context-wise, Millennium was actually so far ahead of its time, I would argue,
that the world is only now catching up with the concepts Chris Carter, Frank
Spotnitz, and the other writers conceived during the three-year span of the
series.
In
terms of story-telling style or approach, consider just for a moment how often Millennium’s
complex formula has been tossed into a blender, ground down to its component
parts, and then presented in pieces, to great ratings success.
For example, the
CSI
formula of the last decade resuscitates the “forensic investigation”
aspects of the Carter series. Programs
such as Criminal Minds ask audiences to travel inside the twisted minds
of the most monstrous human criminals, just as Frank Black did on a regular
basis. And series such as Medium
focused, to a large extent, on the value of unconventional insight in solving
crimes. Millennium brilliantly
combined all these threads, plus Frank’s home life, plus the symbolism of the “yellow
house.”
Outside
of this style, Millennium obsessed on what I call in my book, Terror
Television “those shadowy,
half-understood fears which affect the human heart and soul.” The monsters in the series, though sometimes originating from religious mythology, were also, often, human in nature. Frank faced these human “monsters from the Id” on a
weekly basis in the 1990s, but many of the aspects of life that vexed him in
the Clinton Era have only grown more pronounced today.
If
the 1990s represented the first significant decade of conspiracies run rampant
(George Bush I’s “New World Order,” or The Clinton Body Count), then in 2012
the conspiracy mentality is, in fact, on steroids. Today, we have Birthers, Truthers, Deathers -- you name it -- and they are all tearing
at the fabric of our shared national reality and identity. Wouldn’t it be nice, once more, to have a man
like Frank navigate this shadowy, mysterious world and separate truth from fiction, fact from
propaganda?
The TV program's fictional Millennium Group was the prime mover of a secret history in the
series, but just because the year 2000 came and went without dramatic incident,
that doesn't mean the conspirators would stop attempting to shape
the future. In fact, one sect of the
Millennium Group, the Owls, believed the apocalypse will occur in 2020…just eight
years distant. Imagine the plans they
must be making, right now, right?
On
a connected note, we need gravelly-voiced, insightful Frank Black to pick up his adventures again because of who we have become since Millennium left the airwaves. We seem more divided in 2012 than we have
been, certainly, in my lifetime.
Political enemies don’t merely have disagreements anymore, they try to destroy one another.
The person with the loudest voice wins the cable TV sweepstakes and facts
become lost in “gotcha” point-scoring. It’s not so much “The Truth is Out There” -- as was the mantra of Carter’s The X-Files -- but “The Truth is
Buried Over There, But Let us Distract You From Finding It.”
The
quality I admired so much about Frank Black, and one abundantly evident in Henriksen’s brilliant,
layered portrayal, was his utter lack of susceptibility to such
bullshit.
Even when provoked, Frank
didn't take the bait or grow angry or irrational (unless, of course, his
family was actively threatened). Instead,
he was reasonable and stable, and that is, perhaps, a strange thing to write about
a character who has suffered a nervous breakdown or two (but who’s counting?).
But
perhaps because Frank had seen and understood madness up-close, he had inoculated himself from it on a daily basis. One of the continuing delights of Millennium ,
even today, is how Frank fails to give his competitors or nemeses the satisfaction
of getting a rise out of him.
To
put the matter another way: Frank isn’t worried about how popular he is. He isn’t worried about pleasing the
boss. He doesn’t concern himself with
partisanship or ideology, but instead tries to solve a problem the best he can,
in the most reasonable way he can. Importantly, he isn't selling anything. Now it's not like he's Mr. Spock or Dexter – Frank clearly
possesses strong emotions – but yet he possesses this equanimity;
this sense of wisdom and fairness. He would defend the weak, the voiceless, those assumed guilty.
He is The
Calm. And the rest of the world is The
Storm swirling around him.
Mr.
Henriksen has spoken eloquently about Frank Black in the War on Terror Age, but
I also believe that Frank Black is the perfect hero for America at home, right
now, because he possesses these qualities of stability and reason that often seem missing in action.
In
other words -- perhaps more than ever - we need Frank Black. The Time is past near. It's now.
If you agree with that sentiment, write a letter and support Back to Frank Black's campaign:
Michael Thorn
Senior Vice President for Drama Development
20th Century Fox Television
Twentieth Century Fox Television
10201 West Pico Blvd
Building 103, Room 5286
Los Angeles, CA 90035
Cult Movie Review: Shark Night (2011)
If
you recall (the criminally underrated) Back to the Future II (1990), you
may remember a “future” scene set in 2015, wherein hero Marty McFly (Michael J.
Fox) sees the holographic shark for Jaws 19 and declares that it the
creature still “looks fake.”
Well,
here we are in 2012, and the sharks of Shark Night (2011) still look fake.
The
mechanical shark called “Bruce” who starred in Steven Spielberg’s Jaws
way back in 1975 may not have been wholly convincing – which is why the director often kept it hidden or cut to P.O.V. shots
– but when viewers did see the great
white beast, he at least operated by the same laws of physics as we do. When Bruce broke the surface, water would run
off his back. When Bruce bit a victim,
blood would run down between his very sharp teeth. We might not have always believed Bruce was
100% real, but we believed that he showed up for work, at least.
In
Shark
Night, the sharks phone it in.
They
exist in abundant special effects shots that diminish their size and sense of
scale. Seen in the clear light of day, these
“animals” look like under-detailed cartoons.
They can’t scare anyone because they actually bear no connection to the environment
forces which purportedly work upon them; forces
such as gravity.
In
fact, the sharks of Shark Night not only look incredibly fake – just a step or two up from Jabber Jaw --
they also act in most un-shark-like fashion throughout much of the film, often
leaping high out of the water (like…twenty
feet out of the water…) to swallow their cowering human prey. In one of the movie’s least effective kill
scenes, a shark intercepts a racing jet-ski …from the front, no less…and leaps
several feet out of the water to do so. On
this occasion and several others, director David Ellis lets the shark hold
center frame as it leaps towards the screen (for 3-D impact), thereby offering extreme
evidence of the animal’s incredible phoniness.
Shark
Night earned
pretty terrible reviews, and studying these special effects sharks, one can
detect why. That established, I must reluctantly
admit I didn’t hate this nearly as much as I thought I might, and that’s
because the film unexpectedly plays around in the terrain one of my favorite sub-genres:
the savage cinema. In keeping with that form, the film
acknowledges human ugliness as the overriding source of real evil in the world. In other words, we might escape sharks, but
we can’t escape human nature.
In
Shark
Night , Sara (Sara Paxton) returns to her home on Lake Crosby in
Louisiana for the first time in three years along with a group of co-ed
friends, including shy Nick (Dustin Milligan), a med-student. Sara has been away so long because of an
accident involving her former boyfriend, local diving expert Dennis (Chris
Carmack).
Back
when they were going steady, Sara began to drown on a dive and Dennis wouldn’t
share his air with her. Panicky, she
made it back to the surface alive, but when she piloted the boat for home, she
accidentally struck Dennis’s face with the boat propeller, permanently scarring
him.
Dennis
– who looks no less handsome or buff with
that facial scar, by the way -- has never forgotten this traumatic
incident, and with the help of a dumb redneck, Red (Joshua Leonard) and the
town’s heavy-metal loving sheriff, Sabin (Donal Logue), plans to release
several captured sharks upon Sara and her buddies while they frolic on the lake…
You
can just tell from the first attack in Shark Night that you’re in a
different league here than in Jaws . Remember that film’s classic prologue, and
how a beautiful blonde went for a tranquil midnight swim only to be attacked
and killed by a shark? This introduction to the film remains creepy,
unsettling and highly effective, even today.
By point of comparison, Shark Night opens with a blond in a
white bikini swimming in the lake and getting attacked almost instantly by a
shark. It’s all thrashing and splashing,
and there’s no sense of suspense or even surprise during the attack. People inclined to use the phrase “they don’t make ‘em like they used to”
regarding Hollywood will be sorely tempted to employ it here.
Lacking
suspense, Shark Night is abundantly predictable. If you’ve ever seen a horror movie, you can
predict -- down to the last person (and
animal) -- the characters destined to survive the film’s bloody events.
Also, Joshua Leonard’s character Red is a walking talking cliche, right down to
his bad teeth and bad Southern accent.
He’s supposed to be the movie’s comic relief, but again, we’re in
cartoon territory here.
And
yet, as I wrote above, I didn’t entirely hate Shark Night. I don’t generally prefer horror movies this dumb and
vapid, but they can occasionally be fun if you’re in the mood for something
trashy and light. Plus, Sara Paxton is the star here. She was terrific in The Innkeepers (2012) and is very good here too, despite the thinness of her character.
And
Shark
Night boasts at least one legitimate inspiration. It turns
men into the film’s villains, and gets at the notion that the sharks – while obviously the tools of mass
destruction here – aren’t really the ones with the evil intent. Instead, Dennis and his mates are the ones to
blame. Interestingly, they view
themselves as victims. They’re victims
of women (Sara), victims of a bad economy, and victims of class warfare. Their plan is to make it rich by creating a
shark snuff film for fans of cable television’s “Shark Week.” In other words, they have something to sell,
and they’ve had to put their humanity aside to sell it.
When
one of the would-be victims notes that such a money-making enterprise is sick,
the evil conspirator notes, importantly “There’s
no such thing as sick anymore. There’s
only moral relativism.” It’s a
biting, caustic commentary on our culture, but one entirely of the times. If you remember Governor Rick Perry’s comment
about “vulture capitalists” who go in and eat up companies for profit, you might
also see how the metaphor works with sharks.
These animals (like some capitalists) must keep moving forward -- devouring things, resources and people to
live -- and the rest of us are, well…merely chum.
I
don’t mean any of this commentary to suggest that Shark Night is deep or
especially thoughtful, only that it is “of the moment.” It’s unique that unlike Jaws (1975), the film
portrays man as the real terror in the water, one eager to destroy his fellow
man for a leg up the economic ladder of success.
The
special effects in Shark Night are bad, the characters are mostly barely
two-dimensional appetizers, and there’s precious little in terms of interesting
narrative. Yet to his credit, director Ellis
seems to know all this is the case, and at times (like during the road trip to Lake
Crosby), literally fast-forwards the film
so he can get to the meat of the drama – the
shark attacks – quicker.
Some may see this photographic trick as an
admission of creative bankruptcy. But
contrarily, it may just be an example of efficiently cutting to the chase. Who wants to see shallow characters talking
and relating to one another when we can watch them getting chewed up and spit
out instead?
Shark
Night isn’t
a good film and it isn’t a scary horror movie.
But it is amusingly trashy and lowbrow.
It features moments of interest, especially whenever Donal Logue is
on-screen playing-up the resentment angle of his blue-collar economic
climber. I didn’t hate the movie that
much, in part because Shark Night was clearly made in a
spirit of dumb fun.
However,
if I had been the maker of Shark Night I would have gone one
step further with the movie, and offered up as its ad-line the very joke from Jaws
19 in Back to the Future 2 .
This
time, it’s really, really personal.
